Hello Nick I seem to be following you about. The Alfa looks great. I have a quick question about the kit as I can not tell from your pictures, I seem to remember that Alfas had their foreplanes at different heights when viewed head on due to the diameter of the hull not being able to accommodate them at the same height, my question is does the kit reflect this? I have to be honest and say I can not remember where I saw the info and diagrams though.

Unfortunately, I don't have any experience with those brands of paint. I just use a spray can of krylon crystal clear. And I have noticed with it that room temperature seems to affect it. It is more likely to fog over in a cooler room.

Now, what you are saying I find it most interesting. MikroMir Alfa does indeed have one forward dive plane just above the midship line while the other is slightly below: I have just double checked on the other pristine kit I have in my stash. On the sample I built, the location (which is given in the form of the outline of the plane profile) was present only on one side: this is due to the short-run nature of the model I think. As such and given my references (see below), I built it symmetric in height in the boat shown here.

This very peculiar feature you mention I fail to find in all the references I have. Pics I have do not show both planes out (head-on shot) and these are generally not out in dry-dock and all profiles I have show them perfectly simmetric.Also, what I fail to understand is how these could work when submerged at 40+ knots and not induce a roll on the boat,unless a constant trim is foreseen on the aft planes/rudders but then what a nightmare to handle them!

Maybe Tom or Atma or other Russian Sub experts have more on this!

Kudos to Mikromir (even more) if this turns true and was captured by them in the model!

Thanks for the pointer!

_________________Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence

Nick, I am impressed with Micro-Mir for that little detail, the fore planes wouldn't be out at 40 knots they are, I believe used for depth control at lower speeds. I will look for where I have seen it.

that would make sense if at low speed only - yeah, if you can find the reference I would be most interested!

I have expressed my feelings about the kit here and around the web in general.I found it very well in line with all the profiles I have and its only shortcoming is the total lack of masts. Yes, it is a very tiny bit underscale, but we are talking 1-2mm at the most, so basically un-noticeable, and the PE fret is thick by today's standard, but I love all the "surface" features it has (Tom will kill me if I speak of "panels" ) because they are much more in scale than what you generally find in subs of this scale and I also applaud the choice of showing the limber holes shut for once and not those horrible "fake-empty" things that never look the part unless you go the extra length (as Dan has here) and drill them out.It is not an easy kit (all relative to submarine kits) because it lacks any male/female reference when mating surfaces, but it truly captures the line of one of my favorite submarines ever. Judging also by images of the latest HobbyBoss release, I think it comes out on top of that as well in most areas.

Maybe the guys at MikroMir will listen and they will give us a 1/350 Sierra II soon

Thanks for the interesting points raised!Nick

_________________Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence

So, here is my attempt to go back and show what changes I made to my Akula Gepard.

The bow didn't seem sleek enough. I sanded it down some. It didn't occur to me to cut off the bow and fill it with putty until my Yasen class build later on so I was limited by the thickness of the plastic and didn't sand it as much as I would have liked.

I filled in the original bow plane locations and moved them a little bit forward and down.

I tried to thin the existing bow planes but that didn't work too well so I ended up with new ones from plastic sheet.

I originally thought about adding extensions to the existing rear horizontal fins and rudders but decided that it would be easier to make new ones rather than try to blend in new extensions with original fins.

The conning tower seemed a little short in height and length. I cut it off, added tabs to the bottom, reattached it in a slightly raised position, and filled in the open area between it and the hull. Following and extending the curves of the front and rear of the tower added the extra length that was needed. Also, with the tower removed from the hull, I was able to sand down the sides of the tower base so that it wouldn't curve outwards.

In order to move the two front periscopes forward. I just cut out this area of the tower, rotated it 180 degrees and reattached it.

Here you can see the new positions of the periscopes and I also added a couple more poles made of metal rod to the top.

The water intake didn't look like anything could get "in". So I cut off part of it, Sandwiched the remaining piece between a couple of plastic sheets and trimmed to shape. It's a little too bulky and I considered reworking it by using a thinner plastic sheet center instead. In the end though, I just left it bulky.

The propeller blades looked a little small to me and they had the opposite pitch angle of what they should be. At first I tried to just cut off the original blades and rearrange them but that didn't work. I made a new center piece out of plastic rod. Using a drawing posted by Danilla on another forum, I cut out seven identical (I wish) blades and attached them to the new plastic rod.

Thanks to a quick response by Tim to my question posted over in the russian sub CASF thread I was able to add a bow emblem to the sub. After about 8 hours I had a new emblem similar to the original. I made up my own slogan "supremacy through agility and stealth" and used a combination of translation programs and font programs to basically get what I wanted. Not all the letters came out correct. Sadly, the self made decal was not as resistant to the microsol so it took a few attempts to get a decal to make it this far. As you can see, even this one has been destroyed in some areas. I didn't want to push my luck so I decided that this one was good enough.

Lastly, here's a few pics of it all finished.

This could have turned out better had I decided to make the changes before I had already glued the thing together. Oops.... Oh well, I still like it.

Now that is a much more accurate Gepard, at least shapewise! The turret is really a great fix and the screw a real gem

I love how you make it sound easy, whereas I would have screwed up the model at the least complex of the fixes...

One question (for my information): after drilling out the limber holes, on the inside of the outer hull, did you add something to resemble the inner hull and thus avoid light going through from one side to the other? Just curious because in the last pic it all looks dark and suggests so.

Well done!Nick

_________________Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence

Thanks. I originally worried about light shining through and planned to put in some sort of barrier wall inside. The hull had a slight curve to it when attaching the lower hull to the upper hull. So I thought I might have to push through one of the open holes on one side to help the hull on the other side line up. So I didn't put in any inner hull. As it turned out, by slowly glueing the hull together down one side then up the other side made things line up pretty well after all. And as it turned out, light shining in didn't cause any problems.

GTDEATH13,

Thanks.

Guest,

Like I said, I just made it up and I knew it was wrong before I even printed it.

Well, a little late, but better than never I guess. I almost never venture in this part of the board. But today I did! And as a former Soviet/Russian Navy enthousiast I must say I am seriously impressed by all the work you guys did! I still have some RUssian stuff on the shelf unfinished, but I'll never get it up to your level. Glad to see a lot of guys take the effort to heavily modify/improve the kits! The results are simply stunning. Keep it going since I see some projects haven't been completed yet.